tity of materials as upon their quality; and hence an object that to an ordinary observer may appear to be absolutely without interest of any kind, may prove to be actually invaluable in a scientific point of view.

It is characteristic of all educated communities that they are careful of their scientific materials, because they stimulate observation, and exert in other ways a special influence on the increase of knowledge. And there are special reasons for exceptional carefulness of the materials of archæological science. They are in their nature essentially different from those of the natural sciences. The materials used in the study of these sciences are natural objects; and Nature is prodigal of her productions. But the archæologist deals with the rarelyoccurring relics of the industry or art of bygone generations of men. They were not originally produced in the abounding profusion which is characteristic of natural objects; they neither reproduce themselves, nor are they in any manner reproducible; and the loss of any of them is thus a permanent injury to science. While, therefore, the quantity of the materials of our science was limited originally by the nature of the objects themselves, and has been further lessened by the fact that natural causes have failed to preserve the whole number that originally existed, it has been still further reduced by centuries of destruction and waste, and is being continually reduced even now by the operations incident to a high condition of social and agricultural progress. This is especially true of those classes of remains that are of the nature of constructions-such as earthworks and fortifications of stone, hut-circles, underground dwellings, barrows and sepulchral cairns, stone circles, early churches and their graveyards, and the like. Yet these are almost imperishable, if they could be protected from the hands of men ignorant of their nature and associations, and heedless of the loss to science occasioned by their destruction. They form the most

striking and the most legible evidences of the remoter life and history of the nation. As they alone possess the story of Scotland's prehistoric time, they stand to us in precisely the same relation as the original records of her historic time. We know that the history of Scotland is not the history of any other nation on earth, and that if her records were destroyed, it would matter nothing to us that all the records of all other nations were preserved. They could neither tell the story of our ancestors, nor restore the lost links in the development of our culture and civilisation. So, if our ancient monuments be all destroyed, it will be nothing to us that those of England or Ireland or France or Scandinavia are still preserved, for Scotland's antiquities are not the same as those of Scandinavia or England, or any other region that can be named. They belong to Scotland because they are inseparable features of her individuality; and they belong to Scotchmen in general in a sense in which they can never belong to the holders of the lands on which they are placed. They cannot be collected, like the other relics that are removed into museums; but they can be preserved and protected. The necessity for some kind of efficient protection1 is all the more urgent because the utilitarianism of the present age is so

1 A bill, prepared by Sir John Lubbock, with the intention of providing for the better protection of ancient monuments, has been for some time before Parliament. It proposes the appointment of a Commission, consisting of the Trustees of the British Museum, who shall have power to apply the provisions of the Act to any monument they may judge worthy of preservation, and which is not situated in any park, garden, or pleasure-ground. The word "monument" is defined to include "any British, Celtic, Roman, Danish, or Saxon work, structure, or remains," and the Act may be applied to any of these by serving a notice on the owner or occupier, who, after such service, is to be guilty of a misdemeanour if he injures or permits injury to it, either by destroying, removing, defacing, altering, covering up, building on, or undermining the monument or its site. If the Commissioners refuse to consent to a proposed interference with a monument, the owner may require them to purchase it or a power of restraint over it. The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, while neither disapproving of the principle nor of the general pro

rapidly obliterating the sentiment and the superstition which have hitherto proved their most powerful protectors. In those portions of the country in which the improving agriculturist has been longest at work, you may traverse extensive districts without meeting with a single sepulchral cairn, where but a century ago they were numerous. The larger structures, such as hill-forts and defensive enclosures, placed mostly on sites more or less inaccessible to the plough, have been less despoiled, but the havoc among them has also been great. The Brochs, those massive, dry-built, round towers, which are still the most numerous and the most striking of all our structural antiquities, are fast disappearing as cultivation increases. Though forming by far the largest and the most interesting class of architectural remains existing in the country, it is only of recent years that any systematic attempt has been made to obtain a permanent scientific record of their structural character and the nature of their contained relics; but in a very few years at farthest the materials for completing that record will cease to exist. In fact, so rapidly are our prehistoric structures converted into dykes and drains, farm-steadings and cottar houses, that the generation which becomes fully possessed with the desire to prosecute the study of the works and ways of its ancestors, as a branch of scientific research, will also discover the fact that the study is no

visions of the bill, objects strongly, in so far as Scotland is to be affected by such legislation, to its administration being vested in the Trustees of the British Museum. They are of opinion that the Board of Trustees for Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland is the proper body to be entrusted with the protection of the Scottish monuments, because this Board, which is a branch of the public service established in Scotland, occupies a position with respect to the national antiquities in Scotland precisely analogous to that of the Trustees of the British Museum in England; and it is hoped that the promoters of the bill may give effect to this suggestion in a future measure. [With regard to the nature of the relations of the Board of Manufactures with the Society of Antiquaries and the National Museum of Antiquities, see the note at p. 14.]

longer possible, on account of the total destruction of the materials.1 And, in that day, it will certainly seem to them the strangest and most inexplicable of all the phenomena of the past, that we, who ransack the remotest ends of the earth in order to increase our knowledge and fill our museums, should have looked on with indifference, while every page of the unrecorded history of our own land, and every vestige of the unwritten records of the culture and civilisation of our forefathers, was recklessly effaced. I will not conjecture by what name this impatriotic, unscientific apathy may be called, when the true scientific value of all these things will be widely known and justly appreciated. For the time will come when this knowledge will be as eagerly sought after as it is now regarded with indifference,-when the public purse will be more readily opened for researches in Britain than for researches in Cyprus or in Mesopotamia, and when it will be considered the chief merit of our national museums that they are national. And why should it not? Is there any scientific, or other reason, which demands that our Archæology should not begin at home? Can we possibly be more interested in the ancient history of other nations than in the ancient history of our own people? Are the sculptured stones of Nineveh really of more importance to us than the sculptured stones of Scotland? Can we possibly have an

1 "It appears that within the last half-century there has been a greater destruction of Irish antiquities, through sheer wantonness, than the storms and frost and lightning of ages could have accomplished. Such acts of vandalism have not been always perpetrated by the unlettered peasant. They have most frequently been committed by contractors for the erection of new buildings, for the sake of the stones, or, for the same reason, by men of station and education."-Wakeman's Handbook of Irish Antiquities, p. 81. Though no one has written so strongly as this with regard to the state of matters in Scotland, there is too much reason for the belief that if it had been written it would scarcely have been an exaggerated view of the general testimony of the authors of the Statistical Accounts of Parishes, and other topographical writers.

interest in the scenes and legends of Egyptian or Assyrian sculptures which we cannot feel for the scenes and legends carved on the monuments of our forefathers? It cannot be the fact that we have greater regard for other men's ancestors than for the memory of our own. I think, if we try to persuade ourselves of this, we shall fail, and if we deal closely with the question, we shall be obliged to confess that Scotland and its antiquities have claims to our attention and regard that are prior to those of all other lands, and all other antiquities. It is true that the antiquities of Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome have also their interest for us in connection with the various developments of literature, science, and art. It is to be observed, however, that they have no greater interest for us than for any other nation which is equally a participant in these benefits. But the antiquities of Scotland belong to us as they belong to no other people. No other nation can divide with us the peculiar interest of them. They are ours alone,—ours, as a special inheritance entailed in the line of our posterity by the law of nature, and unalterably inalienable.

The nature of the materials of archæological science being thus peculiar, the methods of dealing with them must necessarily be also, to some extent, peculiar. The first duty which we owe to them is their preservation, because, as I have indicated, their disappearance would be equivalent to the destruction of a series of national records, which time and the elements had spared, to be deliberately effaced in an age of the highest and most widely-diffused culture. The second duty is the collection of those that are portable, and thus liable to be lost or destroyed. I have said that the study of archæology is based upon the phenomena presented within definite geographical areas, and that the first question in every such area is, What are the facts? The answer to this question can only be given in the concrete, by the formation